Aleksandr Eiduk

Who was Aleksandr Eiduk?

Aleksandr Eiduk was a Soviet Cheka operative and poet of Latvian origin.

In 1919, an American diplomat testified to Congress that Eiduk was, with another Cheka leader, considered the "most blood-thirsty monster in Russia". In the 1920s, Eiduk served as a Soviet representative to the American Relief Administration, whose agents appreciated him for "moving with a celerity not characteristically Russian". He was executed in 1938 during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.

Eiduk is best remembered for his poetry extolling the political terror of the Soviet secret police. In Moscow, Eiduk reportedly admitted to a friend, with 'enjoyment in his voice like that of an ecstatic sexual maniac', how pleasing he found the roar of truck engines used at the Lubyanka to drown out the noise of executions.

In the early 1920s, soon after the Red Army invasion of Georgia, he published the following poem in an anthology entitled The Cheka's Smile:

There is no greater joy, nor better music

Than the crunch of broken lives and bones.

This is why when our eyes are languid

And passions begin to seethe stormily in the breast,

I want to write on your sentence

One unquivering thing: 'Up against the wall! Shoot!'